All codecs have been messed up

On a Win XP SP2 system, with Creative Sound Blaster Live! Drive, I have had very good success for most audio. I use Sound Forge 7.0 by Sony and Real Player for most tasks. Recently I tried to use Studio 11 to edit and render a video, but had serious problems with audio sync. Also, when trying to play a video, the sound was very choppy - like a very fast motorboat superimposed.

I had, over time tried installing numerous video codecs with no success. Since I am quite unfamiliar with the whole codec scene, I was at a loss for a remedy. (Anyone have a recommended site for learning?)

I just replaced my MoBo with a pretty good sound card on board. Since I didn't want to do a fresh install of Windows, (way too many issues to do that) I successfully made the transistion by only starting up with 1 drive and no periferals. (Removed all video, raid, and MoBo related drivers just before shutting down.)

Then I disabled the onboard audio and installed the Live! Drive. It worked as well as before, but since I still couldn't watch a video, I wanted to clean things up. (Now the audio with Real Player or Windows Media Player was a thundering motor boat noise.) I used K-Lite Codec Tweak Tool to disable all the codecs I thought might be unnecesary, thinking I could just re-enable them. Dumb move! I should have at least saved what I had 1st. In any case, I ended up with no sound of any kind. Tried and tried to enable or disable codecs without success. Even lost video to the extent that it just jitters with a double image.

I then tried to completely reinstall my sound card software with updates. Worked just fine -- except that I still had no sound. When I ran the Creative diagnostics tool, it said there were no Wave, MIDI, Mixer, DirectSound, or DirectSound 3D drivers. In the Device manager, I have an Exlamation mark beside "Microsoft WINMM WDM Audio Compatibility Driver". got little help by Googleing for that. I'm wondering if the 'Tweak tool' is preventing the proper reinabling of all these drivers.

I would really like to get a fresh start on my sound and video drivers and codecs, but am not sure where to start. Because of licensing and registering of some software, it isn't so easy to just reinstall them. As for actually removing codecs, I'm not sure how to do that either. Of course I'd have to be able to restore some of them too. I now have so many different ones, I don't know what's good and what's bad.

I know this is similar to previous posts, but non of them really address this issue directly. (Obviously a simple restore won't work here.)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Here's some links that should help:
http://www.free-codecs.com/guides/How_to_install_default_codecs_in_Windows_XP_2000.htm
http://www.free-codecs.com/guides/How_to_install_uninstall_DLL_and_AX_files.htm
http://www.free-codecs.com/guides/What_you_need_to_know_about_codecs.htm
http://club.cdfreaks.com/f3/codec-issues-how-uninstall-them-96996/
http://windowsitpro.com/article/art...stall-multimeadia-codecs-in-windows-2000.html (for Win2000 but should be the same or real close for WinXP)
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/12/how-to-remove-or-uninstall-audio-video.html
http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/48608
I could keep going, but this should be more than enough to get you started.

Good luck!

(some great sites for all things multimedia are: www.afterdawn.com - www.videohelp.com - www.digital-digest.com - www.doom9.org - www.divx-digest.com )

 

Thanks for the info dlb. I have read most of the links and have fairly successfully removed and replaced my codecs. I haven't had time to check out everything, but at least I am able to use VLC Video player if nothing else works. I had to reinstall the software for my sound card, but that wasn't too difficult. There is so much information and the technical stuff so involved, I may never learn all of it, but at least if I can get instruction and advice, I can do that.
Thanks again.